The Artistic Gesture within the Digital Creative Process

This chapter asks how works whose medium is the digital – with its tools, its images and its technical specificities – take form. A hypothesis operates in the background and drives the reflection: this digital medium possesses forms of uncertainty that the manifestation of an artistic gesture is able to activate.

The notion of gesture has a very broad field of application, and its semantic projection varies from one discipline to another. The idea of gesture as a codified movement serving communication, as Marcel Jousse might have problematized it¹, is not in principle what is problematized here. This research examines the participation of gesture in the creation, destruction or modulation of sensible forms, through which the symbolic is also modulated.

More specifically, the aim is to address the question of gesture in artistic practices that mobilize the digital – notably algorithms – leaving aside the gesture by which the artist co-creates with the viewer within the framework of interactivity, and leaving aside the artist’s use of physical interfaces such as digital gloves, virtual reality (VR) headsets, graphics tablets, etc.

The aim is to reflect on the place of gesture when an artist creates and/or modulates digital images by means of algorithms (but also of graphical interfaces, understood as a spatial arrangement of algorithms). This kind of reflection has not become a privileged line of research, most probably because the functioning of the digital has mainly been considered in relation to a form of immateriality, in a floating relationship with a conception – itself immaterial – of information and of natural human language². This conceptual framework excludes from the analysis any form of agency arising from matter, while ignoring the gestural genesis both of the machine and of certain human faculties, such as intelligence, as we shall see.

Taking an interest in the creative gesture in the digital arts can be neither an anachronism nor the expression of a will seeking at all costs to connect old notions to new environments. On the contrary, it is probably a question that is beginning to interest academic thought. Indeed, the question of the artistic gesture in the context of the digital has given rise to lines of research – admittedly still few in number – that have recently emerged within institutions in France and abroad³.

Gesture would be not only what makes it possible to inject more uncertainty into an internally determined environment⁴, but also what would make possible a production of personal forms within the digital, at a time when the question of digital style is also beginning to be raised⁵.

Media archaeology supports this intuition, which looks to gesture in digital creation, because it encourages us to exploit the continuities in the evolution of the arts, without being disoriented by supposed ruptures that would demand entirely new frameworks of thought. Put differently, it is a matter of a certain distrust of proclaimed needs for a conceptual tabula rasa, and/or of problematic attempts at periodization, too clear-cut and inadequate. Thus, Fred Forest maintains:

The history of humanity, with which the history of art is intimately merged, is marked by successive stages, in which creation has passed through different phases: that of the use of matter, then of energy, and today of information and the digital⁶.

This kind of periodization proves problematic, because it is structured around elements that are, in fact, intimately linked: there is a very close link between matter and energy, as we know⁷, and information cannot be fully thought outside its material inscription. It is precisely the belief in a disembodied form of information that justifies such attempts at periodization.

The need to introduce the gestural aspect into the problematization of digital creation rests mainly on a felt sense arising from the moment of practice: the observation that, at times, the making of works depends on the manifestation of “something” that seems to unfold spontaneously and that has radical consequences. Gesture, which is neither felt nor characterizable as work, is the expression of a rupture, or of ruptures, within the continuity of the creative process.

In a reflection articulated in three stages, the first task will be to retrace, for the human as well as for the machine, a gestural genesis in which symbolic functioning emerges from structures arising from experience with the matter of the world, an experience mediated through gestures.

Next, attention will turn to the nature and distribution – between human and machine – of the intentionality that triggers and drives the artistic creative process, a process made possible in the digital by forms of uncertainty residing within the medium, forms that will in turn be discussed and specified. These uncertainties must be expressed; they must be “activated” by an artistic gesture – a gesture that may take the form of an algorithmic gesture. A conceptual framework will be proposed for these gestures.

Finally, we will seek to grasp the spatial and temporal domain available for the unfolding of artistic gestures within digital creative processes. These will appear as dynamics through which the work emerges from the interaction between human and machine, at the same time as these entities evolve to enter into resonance with the archaic gestures from which they originate.

Everything happens as if the creative process became the site of expression of an artistic gesture that, starting from the symbolic, initiates a movement by which the human and the machine return to the ancestral gestures from which they originate. From this process the symbolic resurfaces – a surplus of meaning that becomes associated with the work – in a kind of breathing between code and matter, between symbol and gesture.

1. Marcel Jousse, L’anthropologie du geste. Paris : Gallimard, 2008.↩︎

2. Such an aesthetics of the digital finds its inaugural act, as we have already mentioned, in the famous exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985), held at the Centre Pompidou, and it can be found in reflections such as that of Jean-Pierre Balpe; see in this regard Jean-Pierre Balpe, Contextes de l’art numérique. Paris : Hermès science, 2000.↩︎

3. In France, without seeking to be exhaustive, we may mention, within the ICHNOS-ANTHROPOS laboratory, the working group InterGestes : La Geste et Le Geste Numériques, through contact with which this research has been enriched. The journal ASTASA, published by the MICA laboratory (Médiations, Informations, Communications, Arts) of the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, made “Le geste à l’ère des nouvelles technologies” its theme for the 2021-2022 period.↩︎

4. As seen in the central corpus (Chapter 2), the computer as an open system receives uncertainty from its analog periphery (interactivity, captures and, over a longer temporality, data capture allowing the simulation of the real), but algorithmic functioning itself is in essence determined.↩︎

5. Issue 20 of the journal Proteus, published in September 2023 and entitled “L’ère numérique du style”, raises the question head-on. Web link: http://www.revue-proteus.com/Proteus20.pdf, accessed 20 March 2025. Before that, in October 2021 in Toulouse, a study day entitled “Repenser la notion de style dans les pratiques artistiques contemporaines à l’ère numérique” had already addressed the theme. See in this regard https://lara.univ-tlse2.fr/accueil/repenser-la-notion-de-style-dans-les-pratiques-artistiques-contemporaines-a-lere-numerique, accessed 5 June 2025.↩︎

6. Fred Forest, “Esthétique du numérique,” in L’Observatoire, op. cit.↩︎

7. In chapter 4, energy (light, electrical signal, digitally encoded electrical signal) and matter (traditional supports, digital supports) will be mobilized as fundamental components of the digital image, which thus belongs to the great family of artificial images produced by humans: they all need a material support and a signal (such as light to see a painting, or electricity to activate an analog video image).↩︎